Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Elliott Bäck’s current look, with facial hair and up close

Somehow, my eyes turn out very strange in this photo–I blame Adobe

I recently had a post of mine syndicated in short format through WP-Autoblog by Robot World Online:

This is a perfect use of my plugin–to aggregate in a non-copyright-violating format a lot of different resources on a topic–in this case, robots. The guy even enhanced my short summary by bolding the keywords around which he’s aggregating. Now, some of you might disagree, but I feel that this is not spam.

The second issue involves trackbacks, about which Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, has been quite adamant:

As this software runs by default, it strikes me as irresponsible. Judging from the data I’m seeing from Akismet, it’s causing tens of thousands of pingbacks that people are considering annoying enough to mark as spam, and about two-thirds of those are from blogs which are clearly splogs using your software.

There are two cases where pingbacks are sent out:

1. The blog using my plugin is clearly spam
2. The blog using my plugin is not spam

In both cases, pingbacks are useful. In the first, you want to know if your intellectual property is being abused. The ping is an alert system that someone has copied your content. In the second case, the pingback is harmless, because someone has aggregated a snippet of property in a more useful glob.

According to Terry Ng, I’m an A-List blogger. Well, I would be if important people actually READ my blog…

Blog network b5 media says goobye Duncan Riley, one of its founders. What kind of scandal could break up the b5 network?

A new attack on RSA called Simple Branch Prediction Analysis promises to reveal “almost all of the secret key bits” by executing a parallel spy process that only needs to watch a single execution of the RSA private key. Some more technical details show it to be a sophisticated, dangerous attack:

Namely, in the context of simple side-channel attacks, it is widely believed that equally balancing the operations after branches is a secure countermeasure against such simple attacks. Unfortunately, this is not true, as even such “balanced branch” implementations can be completely broken by our SBPA attacks. Moreover, despite sophisticated hardware-assisted partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing or even virtualization, SBPA attacks empower an unprivileged process to successfully attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor.

If that weren’t bad enough, a rootkit now can be persisted in your PCI device. A paper called Implementing and Detecting a PCI Rootkit details how PCI cards execute bios code which can be flashed from the windows software if the user is running as an administrator. Combined with a remote exploit, this could lead to a remote rootkit injection. Also, given that PCI BIOS software is not verified in any way, the rootkit would difficult to detect.